I'm not entirely sure the 'planetary scale' objective you're referring to is as great as you might thing. Separation of powers is very important if you want to maintain freedom and curb oppression. If you can't vote with your dollar or your ballot, you ought to be able to vote with your feet.
The important concept is openness, not uniqueness or monopoly. Nothing is more terrifying than planetary government for example... Because when that government goes bad (they all do at some point), you have nowhere else to go.
When you remove competition in an environment, you might be better off on the short term but the absolute best you can hope for on the long term is stagnation, and you're way more likely to get corruption and a system that preys on the people it is supposed to serve. This is true for standards, corporations, governments, religions or just about any other system.
I only remember one such cases. We actually explain that unlike big megacorp, we can afford to warn our customers and treat them like human beings. They are typically quite grateful. Especially since they tend to notice their computer working a whole lot better once they have it cleaned up.
We're a small ISP and we pretty much do just that. We do not filter extensively, we are very quick to respond to abuse@ emails and disable whichever customer is infected instantly. It really didn't take long before most of our user base made the connection: Infected pc = disabled Internet.
Overall, I think the cost of educating our users was the cheapest alternative. I really don't get why other ISPs don't see it that way.
People who want government-run stuff (rightfully) blame corporations for the very same things.
I think it's easier to take your business to another corporation than it is to take your business to another government though. Capitalism is under a lot of heat these days, but I still prefer it to the state.
For many of those, there aren't even any loopholes... They just ignore the law. Taking them to court for that seems fairly futile too, they appoint the judges.
You know, that's an awesome link... Isn't the MPAA already being sued for unpaid royalties all over the place? Their Canadian equivalent is. If someone can dig out a list of every case, it'd be pretty awesome to make a script that reports every place where any one of those albums is being sold in every state.
Well, I said no new law... They can maintain or scrap whichever existing law/program they want. There's plenty I'd like scrapped, some I'd like maintained. They're still paid to perform some measure of work.
Either way, I'm Canadian and the minority governments we've had of late are probably the best thing that could happen. They still do their share of damage but quite a bit less than before.
I'd take the tax burden to double each and every lawmakers salary if they all provided a sworn statement under penalty of death never to pass a new law. I'll triple their salary if they also swear to go through every bit of existing legislation and throw out anything that is unconstitutional or useless.
Actually, I'm fairly far to the right but I think you make a very good point. Socialism as an idea isn't bad at all. I just don't think it ought to be government enforced or even implemented. In a prosperous society, I think it can be quite an advantage to pool resources together in order to take care of a group... I'd even likely subscribe to some independent systems like that. I just have a problem with enforcing that on people who aren't interested in adding their resources to the pool.
Heck, in a real free country, you could even have your own communist... well commune! If you can find a way to make it work economically, you might even prove that it isn't a failure if the scale is small enough.
A limited government doesn't have the power to keep a competitor off your turf. Any corporation that becomes so large and evil as to oppress the people will find itself with a competitor that will exploit the peoples disdain for it. With the government exploiting the commerce clause so thoroughly lately, they're as much to blame for monopolies as the corporations themselves.
Can you imagine all the lobbyists being sent back out of government offices with this very simple statement: "Sorry, we have no power to legislate on that."?
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
So essentially, you have rights so long as the government thinks it's reasonable. I'd be more comfortable with the US constitution... And I'm Canadian. I do not think I have rights because some bureaucrats decided to put them into law. I think I have rights because I'm a human being.
When firewalling, iptables -P DROP is good. When govenrning, rightstables -P ACCEPT is good. You want limited DROP rules for rights and limited ACCEPT rules for packets.
I guess this research is going to come in handy for some people if you're right. I'm hoping you're wrong though, the number of ways such an exploit could go wrong makes my head spin.
Philosophically, I think money should be made for performing work, including intellectual work. If you didn't find a company who would pay you to invent the mega-spoon, you did that work for free. You aren't entitled to anything but recognition that you came up with it first.
The work and cost of *making* a mega-spoon is something you can be paid for if anyone wants one and can't be bothered to perform that work themselves. If you can come up with a way to make it better or more cheaply than someone else, that's where you ought to make your money.
But wait, you say, there is no way to make billions in that hypothetical world of yours. Giganormous ultra-centralized production (do I hear monopoly?) is almost impossible for simple products with large markets. How can you buy lobbyists and governments? If there's a market, production will tend to be local... It will create more jobs overall, these jobs will have a healthy competing market for labour: mega-spoon makers in Michigan don't pay you enough? Move to another maker somewhere else...
Anyway, I'm sure there's a rational argument for an IP centralized world too but as we tend toward one in our current reality, I'm not convinced by it. I'd accept a compromise like putting a pretty short expiration date on all IP. A song/movie is usually only a big hit for a few months, why should copyrights last decades? Bands/artists should be paid to *perform*: either write new stuff, go on tour or go back to being poor. If you can't offset the cost of your patented idea within the first couple years, you aren't innovating right.
I think what scares them most is that an open source driver would not intentionally cripple OpenGL rendering. The three to four times markup on Quadro cards is nasty business if you ask me. I'm fine with a card being more expensive because it offers you testing and support on professional apps, but comparing a Quadro 3700 with a 8800GT does not shine a very good light on nVidia.
Mind you, I suspect AMD is equally bad, I just never looked at that market in detail.
On a positive note, the tea party is more likely to get behind Paul than Palin. It's just that the news prefers to sell you Palin, she's a poster child for dumb masses and that's exactly what they want you to think of the Tea Party as... A mass of dumb people.
It's a mass of people, with dumb ones in it. You'll find that in just about every political movement. Typically in very similar proportions. Which ones the cameras are focused on determines what the media wants you to think.
You realize that by ridiculing the tea party like this you are helping them win, right? I'm assuming you're just trying to be funny (so do the mods), but really if you want to consider yourself a worthy opponent of their ideology, you ought to study it better and defeat it with rational arguments.
Anyone can sling mud at an idiot, but that doesn't make them look any smarter than their target. If you really are the better man, you ought to show it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not entirely sure the 'planetary scale' objective you're referring to is as great as you might thing. Separation of powers is very important if you want to maintain freedom and curb oppression. If you can't vote with your dollar or your ballot, you ought to be able to vote with your feet.
The important concept is openness, not uniqueness or monopoly. Nothing is more terrifying than planetary government for example... Because when that government goes bad (they all do at some point), you have nowhere else to go.
When you remove competition in an environment, you might be better off on the short term but the absolute best you can hope for on the long term is stagnation, and you're way more likely to get corruption and a system that preys on the people it is supposed to serve. This is true for standards, corporations, governments, religions or just about any other system.
In that specific case 'cooling' might be a pretty good choice.
I only remember one such cases. We actually explain that unlike big megacorp, we can afford to warn our customers and treat them like human beings. They are typically quite grateful. Especially since they tend to notice their computer working a whole lot better once they have it cleaned up.
I don't think this is Troll (but I posted earlier so no modpoints). I think it's a very valid point.
We're a small ISP and we pretty much do just that. We do not filter extensively, we are very quick to respond to abuse@ emails and disable whichever customer is infected instantly. It really didn't take long before most of our user base made the connection: Infected pc = disabled Internet.
Overall, I think the cost of educating our users was the cheapest alternative. I really don't get why other ISPs don't see it that way.
People who want government-run stuff (rightfully) blame corporations for the very same things.
I think it's easier to take your business to another corporation than it is to take your business to another government though. Capitalism is under a lot of heat these days, but I still prefer it to the state.
For many of those, there aren't even any loopholes... They just ignore the law. Taking them to court for that seems fairly futile too, they appoint the judges.
You know, that's an awesome link... Isn't the MPAA already being sued for unpaid royalties all over the place? Their Canadian equivalent is. If someone can dig out a list of every case, it'd be pretty awesome to make a script that reports every place where any one of those albums is being sold in every state.
Well, I said no new law... They can maintain or scrap whichever existing law/program they want. There's plenty I'd like scrapped, some I'd like maintained. They're still paid to perform some measure of work.
Either way, I'm Canadian and the minority governments we've had of late are probably the best thing that could happen. They still do their share of damage but quite a bit less than before.
Honestly? Important legislation? Really?
You think there are laws missing in your country?
I'd take the tax burden to double each and every lawmakers salary if they all provided a sworn statement under penalty of death never to pass a new law. I'll triple their salary if they also swear to go through every bit of existing legislation and throw out anything that is unconstitutional or useless.
Actually, I'm fairly far to the right but I think you make a very good point. Socialism as an idea isn't bad at all. I just don't think it ought to be government enforced or even implemented. In a prosperous society, I think it can be quite an advantage to pool resources together in order to take care of a group... I'd even likely subscribe to some independent systems like that. I just have a problem with enforcing that on people who aren't interested in adding their resources to the pool.
Heck, in a real free country, you could even have your own communist... well commune! If you can find a way to make it work economically, you might even prove that it isn't a failure if the scale is small enough.
A limited government doesn't have the power to keep a competitor off your turf. Any corporation that becomes so large and evil as to oppress the people will find itself with a competitor that will exploit the peoples disdain for it. With the government exploiting the commerce clause so thoroughly lately, they're as much to blame for monopolies as the corporations themselves.
Can you imagine all the lobbyists being sent back out of government offices with this very simple statement: "Sorry, we have no power to legislate on that."?
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
So essentially, you have rights so long as the government thinks it's reasonable. I'd be more comfortable with the US constitution... And I'm Canadian. I do not think I have rights because some bureaucrats decided to put them into law. I think I have rights because I'm a human being.
When firewalling, iptables -P DROP is good.
When govenrning, rightstables -P ACCEPT is good.
You want limited DROP rules for rights and limited ACCEPT rules for packets.
Also, remember that in Canada, the people isn't sovereign, the Queen is. She is the root source of all authority and power of law.
As such, in a very broad legal sense, Canada does have a tyrant, she just likely has no clue what her subordinates are doing in her name.
I guess this research is going to come in handy for some people if you're right. I'm hoping you're wrong though, the number of ways such an exploit could go wrong makes my head spin.
Philosophically, I think money should be made for performing work, including intellectual work. If you didn't find a company who would pay you to invent the mega-spoon, you did that work for free. You aren't entitled to anything but recognition that you came up with it first.
The work and cost of *making* a mega-spoon is something you can be paid for if anyone wants one and can't be bothered to perform that work themselves. If you can come up with a way to make it better or more cheaply than someone else, that's where you ought to make your money.
But wait, you say, there is no way to make billions in that hypothetical world of yours. Giganormous ultra-centralized production (do I hear monopoly?) is almost impossible for simple products with large markets. How can you buy lobbyists and governments? If there's a market, production will tend to be local... It will create more jobs overall, these jobs will have a healthy competing market for labour: mega-spoon makers in Michigan don't pay you enough? Move to another maker somewhere else...
Anyway, I'm sure there's a rational argument for an IP centralized world too but as we tend toward one in our current reality, I'm not convinced by it. I'd accept a compromise like putting a pretty short expiration date on all IP. A song/movie is usually only a big hit for a few months, why should copyrights last decades? Bands/artists should be paid to *perform*: either write new stuff, go on tour or go back to being poor. If you can't offset the cost of your patented idea within the first couple years, you aren't innovating right.
It'd be wonderful but you'd likely need some sort of extremely cheap energy for this paradigm to work well.
Maybe the prospect terrified security to the point where they considered the risk of annoying her worthwhile.
I think what scares them most is that an open source driver would not intentionally cripple OpenGL rendering. The three to four times markup on Quadro cards is nasty business if you ask me. I'm fine with a card being more expensive because it offers you testing and support on professional apps, but comparing a Quadro 3700 with a 8800GT does not shine a very good light on nVidia.
Mind you, I suspect AMD is equally bad, I just never looked at that market in detail.
I am refering to the 'other' paul. It's not like Rand would run for office yet. He's still wet behind the ears.
On a positive note, the tea party is more likely to get behind Paul than Palin. It's just that the news prefers to sell you Palin, she's a poster child for dumb masses and that's exactly what they want you to think of the Tea Party as... A mass of dumb people.
It's a mass of people, with dumb ones in it. You'll find that in just about every political movement. Typically in very similar proportions. Which ones the cameras are focused on determines what the media wants you to think.
Mr Obama, please get back in tough with the needs to of the American people.
According to Mark Penn, all you need to do to get your wish is bomb a large building.
If the *president* has to come out and assure the population that everything is okay, my bet is that everything is not okay.
This is normally a pretty good assumption to make.
You realize that by ridiculing the tea party like this you are helping them win, right? I'm assuming you're just trying to be funny (so do the mods), but really if you want to consider yourself a worthy opponent of their ideology, you ought to study it better and defeat it with rational arguments.
Anyone can sling mud at an idiot, but that doesn't make them look any smarter than their target. If you really are the better man, you ought to show it.
I wonder how much overhead all this nonsensical encryption adds.